President Obama is off to a quick start on his domestic agenda but he has been a bit slower (at least in public) to specify how the foreign policy and national security agenda may shape up.
One of the first indications was Secretary of Defense Gates's statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee January 27. Gates reportedly indicated that the shift of some troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be possible somewhat sooner than expected, while cautioning that our goals must be realistic and limited.
I hope this means that we will keep Afghanistan from becoming another Iraq for us, and that we will focus purely on security objectives, seeking to prevent the country from becoming again a haven for terrorists. That is job one, and it's job enough for our seriously stretched armed forces. (On this subject, I highly recommend the complementary and elegantly written view expressed by Octogenarian .)
In any event, it seems that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have already anticipated Obama's sharpened focus on Afghanistan by increasingly shifting operations into neighboring Pakistan. This is a serious development, but it reinforces the idea that our goals in Afghanistan should remain limited, and it ought to make it easier for us to keep our force at approximately the same soon-to-be-augmented levels.
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